for those who use cryptocurrencies for major transactions in grey economies, things are also good. When liquidity is on the up, it’s harder for states to monitor all the forks, while competition keeps commissions low (although who’s bothered about commission rates – if Bitcoin’s not being used for small-scale transactions?)

So what are the problems?

Security – it’s trickier to calculate the hashrate of a particular fork, and therefore the cost of “51% attack” (because of power migration between the forks). The pool of miners at the moment of transaction validation becomes an important issue.

For investors (and particularly for newbies) this is a bad time. It could not be clear who’s a main player, and who isn’t – or who is manipulating the markets, and so on. I’m certain this will take its toll on the bitcoin exchange rate.

Overall, investors will soon realize that an unregulated, anonymous market has no concept of what an ‘investor’ is, and the ‘store of value’ function is far from being the main one (this doesn’t include people who bought bitcoin back in 2012 🙂 ). It will be especially amusing to watch investment funds who collected money from people, without understanding a thing about the technologies.

But well, it’s a free market – which means that this was bound to happen. It will be especially interesting to see how issues of decentralized decision-making, trust, and community diversification will be handled, and what methods for valuing currencies will now be developed. What we have right now – volume of trading & market cap – are inadequate for dealing with conditions of manipulation. Although Vitalik Buterin tweeted his personal congratulations to the Bitcoin Cash team for hitting second place.

Pavel studied information security since 2003, including topics in advanced cryptography. He then won a series of all-Ukrainian academic competitions (2005 -2007) and received awards for producing the best student research in 2007 and 2008.

Pavel received his PhD in Cryptography in 2012 from the Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics, after publishing a groundbreaking thesis on securing public infrastructure.

From 2006 to 2009, Pavel worked as a security engineer at the leading security company in Ukraine, was involved in an SAP security project, and built out the PKI infrastructure in Ukraine. From 2009 to 2013, Pavel was the team leader and project manager for several IT projects, including being responsible for Rabobank’s mobile application development. Pavel started his blockchain and cryptocurrencies career and research at Silicon Valley startup, Stellar.

In 2014 Pavel cofounded Distributed Lab, a venture dedicated to advancing the cryptocurrency and blockchain state of the art through independent R&D, government projects, collaborations with national universities, and standard-setting initiatives. Beyond operating as a successful business, Distributed Lab has as a core mission developing cutting-edge enterprise tokenization solutions, laying the groundwork for the coming “Financial Internet”. Distributed Lab now has 50 full-time and highly dedicated employees.

Distributed Lab organizes dozens of events every year for the Crypto community – ranging from intensive small-format meetups and hackathons to large-scale international conferences which draw 1000+ attendees. Pavel himself travels around the world to speak at conferences and give seminars. Pavel has conducted over ten full-term courses in universities on blockchain technology and related topics since 2014.